Thanks to Jade Lily, there was an event on “Immersionism vs. Augmentism” on SL’s Orange Island, moderated by Tom Bukowski, our “resident anthropologist”. The discussion was lively — even if necessarily “short”, a lot remained to be said about the subject, as always But several bloggers (many of which attended the event) talked about the issue all over again; it’s clear that Henrik Bennetsen’s essay on the subject is still being read and discussed and that there is still a lot to be said about the two philosophies.

I used to be an “Immersionist” way before I knew what that meant. There were good reasons for me not to reveal my real identity back in 2004 (I had been stalked in RL through the Internet before, as people looked me up on blogs and forums I participated). I wished to continue the joy of participating on a vibrant online community that allowed me both to elude eventual stalkers, and a place where I could have some freedom of expression without fear. Second Life allowed all that — nay, back in 2004, it was even mandatory to keep quiet about your RL! — so I was immediately attracted to it. More to the point, I found out several hundreds (or thousands perhaps) of residents that had the same view. These were collectively labeled “Immersionists” later on.

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Like it or not, you cannot be impassive to it:Julian Dibbell’s Wired article on griefing, specifically what we’re experiencing in Second Life — organised griefing — may very well become the ultimate reference essay on description and motivation in the mind of the griefer.

Dibbell claims that ultimately griefers want to have fun and laugh at things that people find so serious; the more serious we find something, the harder they’ll hit to be able to laugh at it afterwards.

Open to discussion is, naturally, what we can do about people that claim of themselves:

Asked how some people can find their greatest amusement in pissing off others, ^ban^ gives the question a moment’s thought: “Most of us,” he says finally, with a wry chuckle, “are psychotic.”

Worth reading it to the end. Then read about Prokofy Neva’s interview to Dibbell.

And then discuss if griefers are just the ultimate jokesters in a society that lost their sense of humour; if they’re dangerous psychotics; or just bored people who revel in the limelight, and suddenly having found out that there is strength in numbers, and that the era of the individual hacker sitting in their basements without any form of social contact except bragging about their feats on the forums is now over, and organised griefing — sort of “hackers together, going out for a laugh” — is a new trend for the 21st century.’

[UPDATE 20080202: Hiro Pendragon's excellent essay debunking the Wired article should be required reading]

Ana Lutetia tagged me!

Oh no! This means I now have to write eight things about myself, and tag another eight people to do the same. This is almost like spamming. Help!

Well, let’s start with the rules:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Now the bit that hurts!

1. I hate talking about myself. Really. I can deliver a 5,000-word-essay from one day to the other, including some research, but then the editor/publisher will ask me “for a short bio” and I’ll be stuck. For. Ever. I truly don’t like that. It sounds like bragging. Anyway, who cares about what people are, what matters is what they do and say, right?
2. The more times goes on, the more I hate phone calls. Or VoIP calls. It’s hard to explain. Back in 1996 or so I started compulsively abandoning phone calls, which took too much of my (work) time so that I needed to focus on real work. There is no such thing as a 30 second call to deal with something quickly and efficiently. They all take 30 minutes and are a waste of time. If you’re not able to write what you want to do convey, unless you’re dysgraphic (and that’s a disease), you really have nothing worth listening to.
3. Old age is when you start losing patience with people that turn from “clueless” into “stupid”. When you’re young, you’re more tolerant about human stupidity and tend to shrug it off as “merely uninformed”. I’m 104 years old.
4. I’m the worst driver in history. All people around me claim to “drive better than the average”. Since this is statistically impossible, I have to be the one that compensates for all the rest. I’m the singularity of bad driving. To prove it: I think I’m the only person that had an accident while driving the car to do some repairs — inside a garage!
5. I don’t own a TV since 2000. Really. I thought we should move on with the times. Some things should be discarded as we plod along into the 21st century. I don’t miss it a bit. The day gained a lot of extra hours!
6. Never underrate reading. When all else fails (power, computer, your CD player or TV if you’re into it), a book is still portable, lasts a few hundred of years, doesn’t use any power, and is always a source of pleasure for several hours.
7. As a teenager, I worked very hard to become an artist, since that’s what everybody else was doing. I failed at painting, sculpture, playing any kind of instrument (I learned the flute, the violin, and the piano), singing, acting, and writing — all were attempted, several times, and simply never worked out. Frustrated, there was only one source of creativity for me: computers, which are not demanding on the kind of crap you do with them. I’m now too old to be called a computer geek, but I guess that’s what I was as a teenager — and still, I failed at programming, computer-created design, modelling, or music composing! I’m the only resident of Second Life with over three years that can’t build, can’t script, can’t do textures, and can’t do animations. When I tell that to newbies, they ask me how I spent over 1300 days in SL! My answer: having a lot of fun
8. People are the most fascinating things in the universe. Really! I hope to become a sociologist, anthropologist, or even a psychologist in my next life, and study human beings for a living, because it’s the most entertaining activity in the universe. For this life, I content myself in meeting a lot of people, chat with them, learn from them, and hopefully keep a few good friends along my journey in this world.

And finally, the people I’ve tagged, in no particular order:

Tao Takashi, Extropia DaSilva, Hiro Pendragon, Onder Skall, Tara5 Oh, Hamlet Au, Lem Skall, Frank Koolhaas. I didn’t tag Eloise Pasteur,  Tateru Nino, or Prokofy Neva, who were already tagged, but definitely at the top of my list! I would have tagged a lot of more people, but I’m afraid they’ll kill me slowly! (The ones above will probably only roast me in a slow fire, but after I’m dead!)

In “Life 2.0: Augmentationists in Second Life and beyond“, Giulio Prisco writes on the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies’ blog about Second Life’s social changes due to the introduction of voice. The discussion went through the way immersionists disdain the use of voice as a too disruptive technology in our virtual world, while augmentationists claim the right to use whatever technologies they please, while being tolerant towards others that are unwilling to use a certain technology.

Giulio’s argumentation, while more open-minded than most augmentationists, claims that in essence immersionism is a lifestyle choice of a group of role-players, and that augmentationism, as an “alternate” lifestyle, should have the right to peacefully co-exist — while obviously criticising the lack of tolerance of immersionists in “trying to remove voice from the augmentationists”.

I think that his crucial highlight of the issue can be summarised in the following excerpt:

Unfortunately, immersionists have a very valid point when they argue that, with voice and more augmentationist options becoming available (such as the possibility to paste a realtime webcam feed onto an avatar face and body, that may well become available in one or two years), most users of Second Life will become augmantationists and this will effectively discriminate against immersionists and push them into a second class role. They will be able to join immersionist communities where voice and webcam feeds are banned, but will be effectively cut from interacting with most other users.

I understand this argument but it does not seem such a big deal to me. It seems a reasonable assumption that role players prefer to hang with other role players in SL anyway. [...]

If you’re still interested in this debate, I encourage you to join the comments section on this article. Giulio welcomes the commentary and is not only very open-minded about the subject, but understands most of the arguments brought by immersionists. Well, perhaps with an exception: immersionism is not about role-playing, but sort of a fusion of “self as an art form” mixed with the notion that on a social environment where real life credentials can be absent, trust, reputation, and honesty emerge from your behaviour, not from the credentials you’re able to present (your real voice is just one of those). Similarly, augmentationism cannot be reduced to “just having another nice tool to play with”, but enforcing the notion that the mainstream society will rely on presentation of real life credentials to establish trust — those refusing to present them are still welcome to enjoy Second Life, but they’re cut off the mainstream and isolated in their ghettos.

If you think that the whole question is moot anyway — Linden Lab will not remove voice from SL (but add more and more features to it over time), and we do have voice already, so it’s pointless to discuss “what if?” scenarios anyway — skip ahead to the next article

Imagine that you would have an awesome technology that allowed you to create an universe you have just pictured in your mind, to the extent of detail you wish, and that you could get realistic characters walking around your universe, so perfect in its minutiae that their behaviour and looks would be completely impossible to distinguish from real human beings. Now imagine if that technology were available to everybody in the world and that anyone, anywhere could have access to it.

Actually, that technology does, indeed, exist. It’s even quite old, having first been developed over 6,000 years ago. It’s called a book.

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Once more, I welcome Extropia DaSilva’s insight and her most excellent newest essay, that she so kindly allows me to reprint here. Enjoy her fascinating thoughts - Gwyn

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that the pace of technological change is quickening. One of the surest signs of this is the tendency for useful analogies and metaphores to become defunct with almost alarming swiftness. A company releases a virtual world and it easily fits into the catagory MMOG. But another company releases an MMOG, does away with the end user license agreement and the notion that all content belongs to the company, putting creativity in the hands of the users, and we find our old analogies no longer hold.

Still, while those lured into these metaverses might consider it vital to understand what this brave new world represents, others might consider it an ivory-tower debate quite unconnected from everyday concerns. Fair enough. But let’s consider another technology that has become rather more integrated into our everyday lives, namely: The Web. For here we have another example of sweeping change making metaphores and analogies redundant.

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Talking with Rubaiyat Shatner yesterday, he pointed me out to a very interesting article blogged by Hamlet Au, referring to a research paper announced on Terra Nova posted by Nick Yee. On that paper, using some statistical analysis, the researches were able to prove that in Second Life, avatars behave like human beings when keeping interpersonal distance and eye contact, and that the same variations (male/female, indoor/outdoor) that exist in RL can be found in SL as well.

The result is perhaps a bit surprising. We’re used to a cluttered interface, full of IMs, open Inventory boxes, the ubiquous History, sim stats, and perhaps one or two open notecards. Most of the time one is unable to even see with whom they’re talking with, much less keeping interpersonal distance, or eye contact (ie. turning towards the avatar who’s speaking — and what these guys measured was not the “automatic” camera movement which is in-built by LL, but the way you need to use the keys to face the person you’re speaking with, so it’s a deliberate and conscious movement).

I would assume that nobody would care to even attempt to do that. It’s rather pointless — you can still listen to people on History on IM, and you don’t need to “look” at them. And it’s also rather cumbersome, it’s hard to chat and move, since the UI does not help you with that. So nobody in their sane minds should be doing it. Well, ok, I do it all the time, no matter how many windows are open… and well… perhaps all my friends do it as well, at least I see them moving… and… uh… well, even newbies do it… wait a bit. Now that I think 5 minutes about it… everybody does that.

Baffled and puzzled, I went back to Terra Nova and downloaded the PDF. While you can naturally contest the methods used, Nick Yee and his team have proven exactly that. There is a statistically significant number of people that, in spite of everything, really take pains to keep their interpersonal distance and eye contact just like in real life. How strange! Why?

Rubaiyat even went a step further after reading that. Although there is no evidence to support that thesis, it looks like this sort of behaviour — again, in spite of the cumbersome interface! — is actually aided by LL’s interface. So, the camera works “just right” to keep your interpersonal distance at a reasonable focus, and it’s rather easy to check that you’re “just right” in the correct position for interaction (according to the theories measuring interpersonal distance). Now that’s truly uncanny — or is it? Might Linden Lab have taken the necessary camera movements into account to facilitate this sort of “natural” behaviour — in the sense that every human being is supposed to have these distances “written down” in their genes or learned through education? Are LL’s interface developers, after all, much cleverer than we thought?

I have no idea, but I made a simple test. Mac users are notoriously left out of the gaming world, but after reading Brace Coral’s articles on A Tale in the Desert, and finding that these nice guys also have versions for Linux and the Mac, I thought I’d give it a try. Perhaps one of the things that surprised me at their equivalent of the welcome island was a very nice Mentor (*waves* at Eighteen, wherever she might be, since very likely she’s not reading this ) whose first question to me, after some very newbie mistakes was: “So do you come from SL as well?” (note that she didn’t write “Second Life”) I truthfully answered “yes” and asked her why she did ask. “Well, my husband and child are on SL as well, and we seem to get so many people from there these days”. Hmm interesting

In any case, I digress. What was truly fascinating to watch was the way the UI of A Tale in the Desert worked. The camera is hopelessly wrong — the way it works will give any SLer a headache. And there is no precise movement, you just click on places to move. What this means, in terms of social interaction, is that it’s almost impossible to get near an avatar and face them. This would be rather pointless to do, since you only have 5 or 6 silly emotes to begin with (a few more to be gained after months of play, I was tolds), and there is almost no way to attract people’s attention. To compensate, you have some sort of “regional” chat — like you can shout across a whole sim, and communication is done that way.

It’s not the place here to discuss the merits of A Tale in the Desert compared to Second Life; it’s a role-playing game where citizens try to gather support for laws to get passed, or feature requests. It’s interesting in that regard. Also, the sun and the water are rather nicely done, and, like on all MMORPGs, you have absolutely fantastic performance — since content is so limited and downloaded to your hard disk anyway. All the rest, well, looks sort of poor. Namely, the “social interaction” bit is almost completely absent. We complain and complain about Second Life, but, as Yee’s research show, in SL at least you have a simulacrum of interpersonal behaviour. It’s not perfect. It’s limited. It’s cumbersome. But it exists, and apparently, if Rubaiyat is right, it was even designed that way.

Yee’s research was limited to SL for several reasons, and one of them might very well be the easy way of using scripting tools just to gather data of people interacting. On most (not all, though) MMORPGs, this would require more manual processing. Still, SL is not absolute perfect in gathering data — you can’t, for instance, tell if an avatar is male, female, or genderless, except by looking at it. But things like SLstats, which fortunately have started to comply with US and EU legislation on the privacy of personal data gathered on the Internet, can show that it’s rather easy to track down interactions.

This naturally will make me think a bit more about the issue of “self” inside virtual worlds, and probably re-read Extropia’s essays once more.

Again, I’m glad to present Extropia’s latest essay on Self, which raises some very interesting, and in some cases, disturbing questions. No matter how much we’re into the advances of cognitive research, artificial intelligence, and the advancement of the human species through bionic replacements, nearly everyone will be touched by Extropia’s excellent essay and find at least something to think about — even if you do not agree with her!

- Gwyn

An essay by Extropia DaSilva and her Primary.

ABSTRACT:

Technology trends suggest our definitons of ’self’ and ‘person’ will need to be re-examined in the future. Is this future best anticipated by thinking of our avatars in the first person perspective (’I’ am in SL) or the third person (’she’/'he’ is in SL)?

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